Mixed Feelings At End Of AIDS "Talkfest"

by Moyiga Nduru

(IPS) BANGKOK -- The largest AIDS conference to date ended in the Thai capital with campaigners calling for more funding to fight the disease and many participants expressing mixed feelings about whether any significant achievements were made in what some called "a giant talkfest."

In a display of African-Asian solidarity, appeals were made by Nelson Mandela -- the former president of South Africa -- and Sonia Gandhi, leader of ruling Congress Party in India.

Mandela called upon donors, at the end of the 15th International AIDS Conference, to increase their funding to fight HIV/AIDS.

"This applies not only to governments, but also to the private sector and private foundations. It also applies to every global citizen -- no amount of money is too small to make a difference," he said at the closing cermony of the conference which attracted over 20,000 delegates.

In India, where about five million people are living with HIV, Gandhi said AIDS control already accounts for about 10 percent of the country's national health budget.

"We seek the sustained understanding and support of the international community. Multilateral and bilateral financing agencies have been generous and so have some private philanthropic foundations," said Gandhi.

The two spoke after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $50 million contribution on Thursday for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, bringing its total contribution to $150 million.

"However, it's going to take much more than the resources of the Gates Foundation to achieve the scale required to fund the fight against AIDS," said Mandela.

According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS or UNAIDS, 38 million people around the world are now living with HIV. Five million news cases, says UNAIDS, were diagnosed.

The latest UNAIDS report says efforts need to be focussed in Asia, which it warns needs to act now to prevent "a full blown Aids catastrophe." Around 1.1 million people were diagnosed with HIV in Asia last year alone -- more than any previous year.

But the UN agency warns sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe continue to be badly hit by HIV epidemics.

In a statement, made available to IPS this week, the Gates Foundation said the Global Fund faces a major funding gap.

Donors have committed a total of $3.4 billion to the Global Funding through 2004, enough to meet the Fund's needs through the end of the year. However, pledges for 2005 through 2008 are just two billion dollars, far below the 3.6 billion that the Fund projects it will need in 2005 alone.

But Mandela said he would not rest in the fight against HIV/ AIDS.

"As you well know, I have announced my retirement from public life, which means that I should not be here today," he told the conference.

"However the fight against AIDS is one of the greatest challenges the world faces at the start of the 21st century. I cannot rest until I am certain that the global response is sufficient to turn the tide of the epidemic," said the elder statesman.

The Durban Conference in 2000 had provided the reality-check for much of the world about just how bad the HIV epidemic was. The parley was located right in the heartland of millions of impending deaths. The many failures to provide treatments access across the world was made unavoidably stark -- and many in the comfortable West were shaken up enough to begin to address HIV/AIDS.

But it was the previous conference in Barcelona in 2002 that really galvanized the world into action.

So was this 2004 Bangkok Conference a time of accountability on progress?

Graca Machel, patron of the leadership program who presented the Bangkok Statement of Leadership Commitment, blamed a failure of leadership in the fight against AIDS.

"Bangkok should be the end of promises made, promises broken. The lives we lost can't be brought again, but the lives still with us can be cared for," she said.

Participants in the conference also had mixed feelings whether this year's meeting was able to reach a breakthrough bigger than previous ones.

Heloo Bernice, a health worker from Ghana said she gained substantial information during the conference sessions and workshops -- something she said she would be able to use when she goes back to her country.

"I'm going to use the information to improve what I've been doing already in care and support," she told IPS.

Paul Cawthorne, the Thailand coordinator of Medecins Sans Frontieres on the other hand, noted that not much difference has been shown during the six-day conference except for the presence of the Global Village where the community was given an opportunity to interact outside of the formal setting.

Cawthorne hopes that the next AIDS conference, which will be held in Toronto in 2006, will make the breakthroughs the meeting failed to address.

"I hope that the Toronto meeting will go beyond the arguments that we've heard here. Arguments for example whether fixed antiretroviral drugs or generic ones would work or not," he told IPS. "It is clear they do work and the developing world needs those fixed drug combinations at affordable prices and they need them now."

What has made activists angry with the Bangkok Conference is the fact that life-enhancing antiretroviral drugs, for people living with HIV, continue to be produced in the rich industrialized world but not made accessible where they needed most -- namely poor communities in the developing world.

But Mechai Viravaidya, the community co-chair of the Bangkok Conference, told IPS that lessons from Bangkok would be learnt in Toronto in 2006.

One positive feature of the Bangkok Conference, said Mechai, was the Global Village.

"I think every AIDS conference from now on has to take the Thai experience," he pointed out. "The Global Village brings people who are registered, scientists for example, to meet local people and to see that there are many way to express knowledge and opinion, rather than having lectures."